Our first XP of 2015 comes with lessons far away in time and space! Not that far, actually. But how can we relate our game design community to an event in the Cold War: The ASTP joint mission? With Americans and Soviet could work together during a really tense war, I’m sure us peaceful game designers can too! But there’s more to it.

Please send me your comments! Feedback is being amazing and I’m taking a little more care of The AXP this year. It won’t come out so often but I want to deliver more meaningful stories.

Since I’m also in a good mood, here’s an excerpt from a well favorable song for this post.

“Did you think that your feet had been bound By what gravity brings to the ground? Did you feel you were tricked By the future you picked? Well, come on down

All these rules don’t apply When you’re high in the sky So come on down Come on down”

by Peter Gabriel, amazing song called Down To Earth

Thanks everyone!

This is what we have in this issue:
+ LESSONS FROM SPACE
What can game designers learn from one of the most unprobable space co-op missions in history, the Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous?

+ GAME COMPETITION
All about 2015 brazilian design contests and why the “competition” actually are bringing developers closer to each other

+ VERSUS 2014
Last year we talked a lot about the Versus project, creating one game per month during one year. Finally a list with all our creations and some more opinions on it

We have a bunch of new popular foreign games being launched here and this translation thing is something that have been bothering me for quite some time, since I decided to first launch my game PULSE in English. But how does someone translate some work to another culture?

This is also an edition where I changed how Full Games will be handled. Well, like evertything else here, this is a new experimentation on my behalf. I always hated how the format of the magazine changed for some games we published and it used to just greatly enlarge the size of the magazine. Another thing is that these games are mostly prototypes frequently being tested and updated, but Patreon still does not let us re-upload files. So I decided to keep the games in an environment that I can edit and change the files so you’ll always have access to the latest version available.

Please send me your suggestions on this matter… and on everything you want to!

In this issue:
+ Interviews: LOST IN TRANSLATION?
What are the main worries when decoding a game to a different language? These are the guys we asked that:
AISLAN DE BORBA ( Our Last Best Hope )
MATHEUS FUNFAS ( FATE Core )
ANESIO VARGAS ( Numenera )
GILVAN GOUVEA ( Iron Kingdoms )

+ SPEED DESIGN
The experience on writing one game a month for almost an year

+full game: PRISONER
A GMless story game about survival and co-op between enemies isolated in a hostile planet

Hello, my beloved Patreons and other followers! This is a page from The Analog XP #6 entitled “The Road so Far”, where I created a fast summary on what we discussed already. I believe this could be also helpful for newcomers or even an index when looking for a specific subject.

So issue number 5 is finally online! This was a very cool month here in Brazil with a lot of different discussions. We had presidential elections and most people were really into discuss almost about anything! On top of that many talks about how our market is going. Our economy still favor the internal market what makes international shipping almost impossible for us, and that shouldn’t change anytime soon since our last president got re-elected. So the best I can do for now is keep working on digital content!

In this Analog XP you will find:
+ GAMES AS ART?
The old discussion about games as a new art form gains a new perspective through story games

+ STORY VS CHALLENGE
Should this be something to discuss at all?

+ DESIGN MATTERS
A look on how Brazilian games really care for their looks and how could that affect gameplay

+ Full Game: LOOKING FOR HOME
A profound solo game focused at the search for things to really care for

Great content at this edition! Since the game is only 3 pages large I decided to deliver more articles. Actually that and there were much things I wanted to talk about Gen Con 2014, the Brazilian cons and this theory about Narrative DNA.

But, woa! The first Analog XP after returning from Gen Con!

So now things change a little and I guess the content will be something really enjoyable. After spending the first 3 issues introducing our community, I’ll start introducing some of my personal theories and also some thinkings from some other game designers around here. At this issue me and Eduardo Caetano will talk a little about how all this time reading and playing foreign games really changed the way we think about games, heavily inspiring us in our first attempts, both really successful. But we will also talk about Julio Matos thinking on why we shouldn’t call all the games we play RPG. That is something we discuss a lot around here and seems to be not that frequent in the US discussions. Let’s find out.

Please send me all your impressions, sugestions, complaints and also portuguese to english corrections. I’m getting a little too confident but I don’t want to be overconfident. That’s when most errors appear.

You will read on The Analog XP #4:
– GenCon 2014:
We were at the best four days in gaming and here is our experience
– Narrative DNA:
Years playing foreign games defined a generation of Brazilian RPGs, but did something change now?
– Why I Abandoned RPG:
Julio Matos says why the term RPG is not so good to define most of our narrative indie games
– FULL GAME: Metroyska Journal
A breathtaking three player game about treason, war, and survival inside a sunk soviet submarine at the bottom of the ocean

And finally, The Analog XP #2! These first three editions will present some of our history on analog gaming and some of our current creators. Then we will finally start discussing some game theory on future editions.

In this issue:

+Indie v Mainstream
Authors and Publishers from many generations talk about it. What changed? How do the big publishers help?